After the Fall

by

Paul Clark

I was born at the tail-end of the baby boom. By the time I hit grade school, the air raid drills that my older brothers and sisters had gone through, in preparation for a possible nuclear strike by the Soviet Union, had been replaced by tornado drills—same alarm system, just a different (and more likely) threat. But the existence of the Soviet Union was a common thread in the movies I watched and the books I read in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I’ve always loved books and movies that featured spies and espionage and for most of pop culture post-WWII, there was only one enemy—the vodka-drinking, fur-cap-wearing, snow-trudging, Boris Badenov-like killers from the East. The Cold War was something that had always been, and probably always would be.

When I was working in a bookstore in the early 1980s, I first came across the series of books that Philip Roth edited for Penguin Books that featured writers from behind the Iron Curtain. Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, Danilo Kis’ A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Milan Kundera’s Laughable Loves, and Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass were the first books I read by writers living under the uncertain terror of Soviet control. The texts had to be smuggled to the West before they could be translated. The writers faced privations—including jail, torture and death—that no western writer had to worry about.

I was duly fascinated by the lives of these writers and the stories they told. Although the characters lived lives that were in large part controlled by the state, the characters lived and loved and laughed and feared and, often, survived, just like characters in American novels. The circumstances of the books’ creation were different, but the goal of the authors was similar—to tell a story (and, of course, sometimes to get away with suborning the authority of the state).

In the safe confines of my American life, I wondered what would happen to writers from the East if they no longer lived under the crushing oppression of their overseers. Would they still be able to write? Would they still be able to publish? How would they react to artistic freedom?

Then the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed into pieces. For the first time in decades,people sequestered behind the Iron Curtain got a taste of the freedoms taken for granted in the West. The transition was not easy and it certainly wasn’t pretty.

In Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, editor Boris Fishman collected twelve stories, mainly by American writers, written after 9/11 and mainly set in various eastern European countries in the early 1990s. The stories depict a world that is like a kaleidoscope smashed on the edge of a cold cement step; it’s a world with no rules, no equilibrium, peopled by characters who at times are like little kids spinning wildly in a field until they get so dizzy they just fall down in giddy excitement.

The crushing tyranny of the Soviet system has been replaced by the gale force of unfettered capitalism which is at the same time liberating and destructive, depending on which country you are in and your status in life. Although the stories are filtered through the prism of western eyes, you understand how Fishman, in choosing the title of his collection, is equating Eastern Europe of the 1990s with America’s Wild West of the late nineteenth century.

Gary Shteyngart’s “Shylock on the Neva” gets the collection off to a rollicking start in his tale of a St. Petersburg banker who tries to stay one step ahead of his assassins while nurturing the career of a painter he has commissioned to do a portrait of himself. It is a tale best read with a soundtrack of 1990s-era house music blasting in the background. Tom Bissell’s “The Ambassador’s Son” is narrated by the titular character, who gets into a variety of scrapes in an unnamed Central Asian country that are at first mainly embarrassing to his family but then rise to the level of international incident.

Arthur Phillips’ “Wenceslas Square” is a sometimes heartbreaking tale of an American spy who falls in love with a Czech spy in the last months of Soviet control of that country. The two spies spend much of the story telling lies to each other and to their spymasters so they can remain together in a mutual compact of duplicity.

In Wendell Steavenson’s “Gika” an American woman living in the former Soviet republic of Georgia befriends a young boy, a street beggar, a refugee from the wars that broke out between and within various former Soviet states in the 1990s. Josip Novakovich’s “Spleen” is set in Cleveland and features the lives of various Bosnians who settled in America after their country became a war ground.

Paul Greenberg’s “The Subjunctive Mood” features an American UNESCO official who moves to Paris with his much younger girlfriend, who is studying to be a clown. Her rigid training regimen is contrasted with his mundane desk job, which becomes anything but mundane when he has to travel to Sarajevo at the peak of the siege of that city in the mid-1990s.

One of the funnier stories is John Beckman’s “Babylon Revisited Redux,” in which former vice president Dan Qualye comes out of retirement post-9/11 to undertake what he thinks is a bit of diplomacy in Poland, but turns out to be something that he never quite comprehends.    

As I read these stories, the tones ranging from bawdy to bittersweet, I thought of today’s American enemies. To my kids, the Soviet enemy is like the Nazis were for me growing up—something to read about in a history book and maybe to occasionally see in an old movie, but not to fear. The Islamic jihadist has replaced the Soviet spy who replaced the Nazi who replaced . . . well, the list goes back to the British, I guess. I hope that within my lifetime the jihadist goes the way of all the other enemies—either defeated or assimilated; I don’t really care. Reading the stories in Fishman’s collection shows the stark contrast between the Cold War World and the Wild East World.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it